从幻想到现实：技术泡沫的相似之处

每当我看着投资者将数十亿美元投入到另一场技术革命中时，我都会想起马克·吐温的智慧，“历史不会重演”

Whenever I watch investors pour billions into yet another technological revolution, I am reminded of Mark Twain's wisdom, “history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” His words best describe the parallels between the dot-com era and the current fever over artificial intelligence.

每当我看着投资者将数十亿美元投入到另一场技术革命中时，我都会想起马克·吐温的智慧：“历史不会重演，但它经常押韵。”他的话最好地描述了点-Com时代与当前对人工智能的发烧之间的相似之处。

From illusion to reality: parallels of tech bubbles

从幻想到现实：技术泡沫的相似之处

Do you remember the dot-com boom of the late ‘90s? That was an era of boundless optimism, when every company with the prefix .com in its name seemed like a gold mine.

您还记得90年代后期的互联网繁荣吗？那是一个无限乐观的时代，当时每个以其名称的前缀.com的公司似乎都是金矿。

Behind the scenes, however, a less visible but no less dramatic story was unfolding: the story of fiber optic technology, which promised to build the “information superhighway” of the future, where data would travel at the speed of light.

然而，在幕后，一个不太明显但同样具有戏剧性的故事正在展开：光纤技术的故事，它有望建立未来的“信息超高速”，数据将以光速传播。

In the shadow of big names like Boo.com, another bubble was quietly inflating: fiber-optic firms that took off like rockets on promises of endless growth. Their stories are similar to today's narratives about the artificial intelligence revolution.

在Boo.com之类的大人物的阴影中，另一个泡沫正在悄悄地膨胀：光纤公司像火箭一样起飞了无尽增长的承诺。他们的故事类似于当今关于人工智能革命的叙述。

Ciena and other companies sold the future based on Forbes' prediction that "communications bandwidth will triple every year for 25 years." Telecoms invested over $500 billion in fiber optic infrastructure that was 85-95% unused after the collapse of the bubble.

CIENA和其他公司根据《福布斯》的预测，即“通信带宽每年将在25年内将三倍”出售未来。电信在泡沫崩溃后未使用85-95％的光纤基础设施投资了超过5000亿美元。

Today, we see an almost identical picture in artificial intelligence.

今天，我们在人工智能中看到了几乎相同的图片。

The investment fever of our days

我们时代的投资热

Four tech giants - Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft - announced $320 billion in capital spending this year alone. That's 40% more than last year, and roughly equivalent to two-thirds of all fiber investments in the entire '90s, but spent in just one year.

四家科技巨头 - 亚马逊，Google，Meta和Microsoft-宣布仅今年的资本支出为3200亿美元。这比去年增加了40％，大约相当于整个90年代所有光纤投资的三分之二，但仅在短短一年内就花费了。

Mark Zuckerberg isn't shy about scale - he announced the construction of a Manhattan-sized data center for artificial intelligence. The $500 billion Stargate project and the UAE's initiative to invest $1.4 trillion in U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure suggest that we are in the midst of an unprecedented investment boom.

马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）对规模并不害羞 - 他宣布建设曼哈顿大小的人工智能数据中心。这项耗资5000亿美元的星际之门项目和阿联酋为美国人工智能基础设施投资1.4万亿美元的倡议表明，我们正处于前所未有的投资繁荣之中。

Nvidia as a symbol of an era

nvidia是一个时代的象征

The main beneficiary of this boom has been Nvidia. Since the introduction of ChatGPT, its market capitalization has grown from $400 billion to $2.8 trillion - a sevenfold increase! And it's not just speculative growth - the company's sales have soared from $27 billion in 2022 to $130 billion in 2024.

这种繁荣的主要受益者是Nvidia。自从引入CHATGPT以来，其市值已从4000亿美元增长到2.8万亿美元 - 增长了7倍！这不仅是投机性增长 - 该公司的销售额从2022年的270亿美元飙升至2024年的1300亿美元。

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes that we've entered an era of "agent-based artificial intelligence" that requires 100 times more computing resources than anticipated a year ago. This he attributes to the need for massive investments in chips and data centers.

NVIDIA首席执行官詹森·黄（Jensen Huang）认为，我们进入了一个“基于代理的人工智能”时代，其计算资源的计算资源比一年前的预期要高100倍。他归因于对芯片和数据中心进行大量投资的需求。

But even CEOs of tech giants recognize an element of FOMO (fear of lost profits) in their investment decisions. Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently stated, "At this stage of exponential growth, the risk of underinvestment is dramatically greater than the risk of overinvestment."

但是，即使是科技巨头的首席执行官，也认识到投资决策中FOMO（担心利润损失）的要素。 Google首席执行官Sundar Pichai最近表示：“在指数增长的这个阶段，投资不足的风险大大大于投资过度的风险。”

An alarm from the Middle Kingdom

中间王国的警报

On January 20, a little-known Chinese company DeepSeek released an artificial intelligence model R1, which is able to reason at a level comparable to OpenAI models. But the main surprise was that its training cost many times cheaper than its competitors, while using old-generation chips.

1月20日，一家鲜为人知的中国公司DeepSeek发布了人工智能Model R1，能够以与OpenAI模型相当的水平进行推理。但主要的惊喜是，使用旧代筹码时，其培训的成本比竞争对手便宜多次。

That news started a chain reaction on Wall Street dubbed "Artificial Intelligence Black Monday," the largest single-day selloff of Nvidia stock in U.S. history at $600 billion.

该消息开始在华尔街（Wall Street）称为“人工智能黑色星期一”的连锁反应，这是美国历史上最大的NVIDIA股票的最大单日抛售，为6000亿美元。

DeepSeek has demonstrated that the future of artificial intelligence may not be in brute computing power, but in algorithmic efficiency - models learn to think and know where to serve food, rather than memorizing everything. This can radically reduce the cost of training and running models.

DeepSeek表明，人工智能的未来可能不是蛮横的计算能力，而是在算法效率中 - 模型学会思考并知道在哪里提供食物，而不是记住一切。这可以从根本上降低培训和运行模型的成本。

An equation with unknown profits

利润未知的方程式

Another troubling signal is that the artificial intelligence economy is not yet working. By some estimates, America's largest software companies have earned only $10-20 billion from artificial intelligence products this year. That's a drop in the ocean compared to nearly half a trillion dollars in investment.

另一个令人不安的信号是人工智能经济尚未起作用。据一些估计，美国最大的软件公司今年仅从人工智能产品中赚了100亿美元。相比之下，这是海洋中的下降。

Even OpenAI, in the words of Sam Altman, isn't breaking even, despite a subscription fee of $200 a month for a premium plan.

即使用山姆·奥特曼（Sam Altman）的话说，即使openai也没有打破，尽管每月订阅200美元的高级计划费用。

A story waiting to rhyme

一个等待押韵的故事

According to a sobering report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, artificial intelligence will add just 1% to GDP growth over the next decade. While the technology could theoretically replace up to 20% of jobs, that figure shrinks to a modest 5% when real-world implementation costs are taken into account.

根据经济合作与发展组织的一份清醒报告，人工智能将在未来十年中增加1％的GDP增长。尽管从理论上讲，这项技术最多可以代替20％的就业机会，但考虑到现实世界实施成本时，该数字缩小了5％。

We are witnessing a classic situation where the ambitions of technology giants and investors are far ahead of the actual implementation of the technology. As the head of Nvidia noted, the industry was wrong in its forecasts: "The demand for computing power and scaling of artificial intelligence is not only not decreasing, but is actually growing at an incredible acceleration.

我们目睹了一个经典的情况，即技术巨头和投资者的野心远远领先于技术的实际实施。正如Nvidia的负责人所指出的那样，该行业的预测是错误的：“对计算能力和人工智能的规模的需求不仅不仅在减少，而且实际上以令人难以置信的加速增长。

And there's a serious threat to the

而且对